(CHICAGO, 2003) - A Muslim charity leader linked by prosecutors to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was sentenced Monday to more than 11 years in federal prison for defrauding donors. Enaam Arnaout, 46, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen who says he has met bin Laden but opposes terrorism, was calm as the sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Suzanne B. Conlon.

The government's investigation of Arnaout and his Benevolence International Foundation, based in suburban Palos Hills until it was shut down in 2002, has been a major component of the war on terrorism. Attorney General John Ashcroft traveled to Chicago to announce the charges against Arnaout when he was indicted. Arnaout (pronounced ARE-not) pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge, admitting that he diverted thousands of dollars from his Benevolence International Foundation to support Islamic military groups in Bosnia and Chechnya.

Two years ago, an obscure Muslim spiritual leader named Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani stepped to the microphone at the State Department and issued a chilling admonition to Americans to beware the Muslims in their midst.

He warned that Islamic extremists had infiltrated the vast majority of American Muslim mosques and student and community groups, and that they had bought more than 20 nuclear warheads and were paying former Soviet scientists to break them into chips that could be carried in suitcases.

''We want to tell people to be careful, that something major might hit quickly,'' he told a forum on Islam convened by the State Department.

The chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America says only by reaching out to Islam's masses can hatred and terrorism be ended

Do Muslims hate America? Not at all, says Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA). But he adds that Americans must understand the struggle going on inside one of the world's great cultures and religions. Recently, BusinessWeek contributing correspondent Raluca Topliceanu spoke with Kabbani about the reaction of Muslims to the bombings in Afghanistan and new fears about future attacks by Osama bin Laden. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

Muhammad Hisham Kabbani is the chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, a religious organization founded in 1997 with offices in Washington, D.C., and Michigan. A scholar and Sufi sheikh of the Naqshbandi order, he was born in 1945 in Beirut, Lebanon. He received an undergraduate degree from the American University of Beirut in chemistry, studied medicine at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and earned a degree in Islamic law from Damascus University. In 1991, he moved to the United States to establish traditional Islamic teaching and the Naqshbandi Sufi order, opening Islamic centers, founding a humanitarian aid organization, and engaging in interreligious dialogue. Sheikh Kabbani lives in California and the Midwest. The Middle East Quarterly interviewed him in Washington, D.C., in July, 1999, and conducted follow-up discussions with him in March, 2000.